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Four Poems by Tom McCauley

Tom McCauley

Tom McCauley is a writer, musician, and arts administrator living in Omaha, NE. In 2011, he received a studio fellowship from the Union for Contemporary Art and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008. From 2007–2012, he co­edited Strange Machine poetry journal and Strange Machine Books. His poetry has been published in The Oyez Review and Leveler Poetry. He is currently working on a book, Street Life Fragments, with photographer Sam Herron.

The Tree May Die, Yet the Shadow Remains

Once highly prized among the pioneers of light, the hours now lean heavily toward the ground.

The sky is brighter in old photographs because the air was thicker—poor optics

from a ruined lens could account for this, but the air was thicker, it could hold things

for a moment: grown men strapped to pterodactyl wings,

the morning moon in its upturned face. Long ago, cameras conquered dust.

A woman saw herself as others see her, not in a mirror, but staring straight out into the world

like a lioness, queen of all Ohio. Tonight her skeleton fosters a subterranean civilization:

microbes, complex worms, decay. But the ambrotype in her descendant’s attic

is poised as ever to ravage the industrial age, (in that room, it is always noon) thank you, chemistry.

First Date with the Moon

In California, I was made to trace the moon for sixth-grade science class. The lunar phrases I repeated under my breath as we visited the ocean and Disneyland, where a sour mood assailed me, created a cloud of suspicionaround our tribe. “He's so...sullen,” somebody's uncle told mine. You must wait two hours to ride the future cars, which last ninety seconds. Once part of earth, the moon roars whitely in the night vacuum, so angryyou can’t make friends with it, nothing like the soft piano tunes you imagine on a first date (with the moon). Soon, my notebook filled with black scratches of crescentsand half-circles. I desired pancakes. The moon parted the curtains late one night to insult me. “Fatty,” it taunted. “Fatty fat.” I woke up weeping, remembering somethingsand-flavored Grandma had said on a drive through the mountains.“What's Tom gonna do?” she waxed.“Nothing. Nothing! He'll have to go out and get a job, just like his mom.”Fifteen hundred earth miles from the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, or home, as we called it in the hinterlands, I made a great crying noise like the teenagers from Colorado on TV that week, who’d been shot during Astronomy lab. The next bed over, my aunt pretended not to notice. A travel agent, she’d glimpsed the moon from every time zone, even China, and said it’s nothing to lose sleep over. It will always be there.

The Cloudinator

We were the family that invented tornadoes.Everyone looked to us for piano lessons, Kool-Aid, moral support, etc. Our treesglowed better than anyone's. No radioshanging on wires from upstairs windows,no overturned laundry baskets in the driveway, just a backyard full of grass and holiday lightsall year. Time and weather moved usto create a vortex from the skythat would sincerely fuck the world.It was a genetic affair, John drawing blueprints adorned with equations and photos of his ex-girlfriend with her new Moroccan lover,me trying to think of a name for our projecton which to launch a revolutionary ad campaign.The Cloudinator? The dancing circus funnel?Nothing stuck. Of course, we couldn’t know the destruction we would unleash upon Nebraskan roads. In retrospect, how could we not? We were a familyblinded by gratitude and respectfor one another and our place in the neighborhood. We were slumped over our dinner plates one nightwhen I thought up the name.

Gatekeeper's Last Words

As a child I stuck my headin bags of dusty toysto smell the disassembled cities.

What dreams of nightmares wakesto night milk on the stairs,where belladonna tendrils

draw documents from my shoulders.Echo, you were my Letter Horsefor an afternoon. We sang delicately

in a bottle of fireflies.Do you think God will keep my gatesafe from elephants like me?